When Tom Rice of Coronado came home from fighting the Germans, he had seen so much death and destruction that he changed his mind about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He became a teacher instead of an engineer.

Harris Chuck of Vista had seen so little of the war, imprisoned the whole time by the Japanese, that he came home angry about the missed opportunity to be part of something so sweeping and storied. He stayed in the Marines for another 25 years, getting his chance to fight in Korea and Vietnam.

That’s what World War II did, for those fortunate enough to make it back: It changed their lives.

It changed them in ways they didn’t always understand and couldn’t always articulate. Some went on to great things, soaring on the wings of triumph. Others never recovered from what they’d seen and done. They all were scarred, and the healing — or not healing — sent echoes through their families, across the generations, and out into their communities, changing them, too.

San Diego was altered by the hundreds of thousands of men and women who came to train for combat or to build B-24 bombers and other planes. The city’s population almost doubled from 1940 to 1943. Many of the newcomers stayed after Hitler and Hirohito were defeated, remaking what had been a sleepy retirement town.

Some of those doing the remaking helped create San Diego’s public universities and hospitals and bayfront jewels. They starred on baseball diamonds and in jazz clubs.

Now there are about 20,000 World War II vets left in San Diego County, part of the dwindling “Greatest Generation.” Of the 16 million Americans who fought in the war, only about 2 million are still alive. One dies roughly every two minutes.

They take a lot of history with them when they go. Name any significant battle, the ongoing stuff of movies and books and plays, and someone who lives here was there: Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Iwo Jima, the Battle of the Bulge.

It used to be they wouldn’t talk about what happened when they were young and the world needed saving. They’d moved on, to the GI Bill and the Baby Boom, to televisions in every family room, to America as the pre-eminent power. Nobody wanted to be seen as bragging, not when so many others had paid the ultimate price in combat.

Many will talk now if you’ll ask them, as the U-T has done for the past year in a series of articles and videos about the war and its legacy. The vets shared stories of bravery and fear. They talked about luck, good and bad. They wept.

One thing they all remembered: How indescribably wonderful it felt when the war ended.

World War II

Throughout Europe, church bells rang. Holidays were declared. “A nightmare has been lifted,” the Swedish prime minister said.

In San Diego, liquor stores were ordered closed and the police were put on 12-hour emergency shifts, but there was no festive mayhem. A few churches held thanksgiving services. The four major aircraft makers — Consolidated, Rohr, Solar and Ryan — seemed to reflect the community’s mood when a spokesman for them said, “Until Japan, as well as Germany, has been defeated, we have achieved only a partial peace, and our work is only partly completed.”

Completion came three months later, on Aug. 14. Japan capitulated, triggering celebrations from coast to coast, a great unshackling of the nation’s angst after almost four years of war — four years of sacrifice on the battlefield, but also at home with gas rationing, curfews, blackouts and bond drives.

The euphoria is frozen in the collective memory as a photograph, a famous Alfred Eisenstaedt picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square. (That image inspired the “kiss” statue on the Embarcadero near the Midway Museum.) Behind them, people are smiling. The whole country was smiling.

In downtown San Diego, Broadway became “a solid, seething mass of humanity,” the San Diego Union reported. Traffic was at a standstill. There was honking, but not in anger.

“Sailors, soldiers and Marines — tens of thousands of them — jammed the sidewalks,” according to an account in the Tribune-Sun, “overflowed into the streets, shouted ‘Chicago, here I come’ and ‘I’m goin’ home,’ smothered women passers-by with kisses, performed strange antics that for V-J Day seem the thing to do.”

Among the strange antics: Marine Pvt. Charles Moelter climbed a 50-foot palm tree in Horton Plaza and attached a U.S. flag to the top. When he scrambled back down, “women and girls fought for the privilege of kissing him and begged his photograph,” the Union reported.

Another one: C.E. Burns of Jamul came downtown with a Japanese war flag and “invited servicemen to do their stuff,” according to the Union. They stomped on it and tore it to pieces.

Again the liquor stores were ordered closed, but press accounts said bottles “of every description” soon littered the sidewalks and gutters. Motorists flocked to Tijuana to restock, until the government there shut booze sales, too. Some 30 people were arrested for public drunkenness.

A headline in the Union the next day summed it up: “People Act Funny After Wars.”

Reshaping San Diego

Tom Brokaw, the former TV anchorman, is the one who dubbed it “The Greatest Generation” with a book by that title in the late 1990s. And by great, he didn’t just mean that they won the war. They ushered in decades of prosperity and promise and began to confront long-standing problems of gender-bias and racial discrimination. They remade the world.

In San Diego, the reshaping happened in countless ways large and small.

Take, for instance, Roger Revelle (1909-1991). One of the Navy’s top wartime oceanographers, he persuaded the University of California to open a campus in La Jolla.

San Diego State College became a university under Malcolm A. Love (1904-1990), a former executive officer at naval training schools in Ohio and Mississippi. During Love’s 19-year presidency, State swelled from 5,000 students to 30,000, and from 161 full-time faculty to 1,128.

Or consider the many hats worn by another educator, Raymond Leon Malcolm (1923-1993). At the battle of Okinawa, he was Ensign Malcolm. At Ray Kroc Middle School, he was Principal Malcolm. At the beach, he was “Skeeter,” a legendary waterman who first surfed Sunset Cliffs in the 1930s.

The water called to many of these veterans, including San Diego native John D. Butler. A Navy dive bomber in the South Pacific, Butler (1915-2010) was elected mayor in 1951 and championed Mission Bay’s development.

War required so many sacrifices that life, and health, became precious. The death of Army Air Corps Lt. Donald Sharp, shot down over Germany, moved his father to donate $500,000 to the San Diego Hospital Association. That gift led to a new hospital, the first in what is now the Sharp Healthcare chain.

San Diego’s pop culture, from sports to music to fast food, was also enriched by war veterans.

Jerry Coleman was a Marine Corps pilot before he was a Yankees second baseman and before he became the announcer — and, briefly, the manager — for the Padres. At age 88, he still hangs a star now and then from the broadcasting booth.

Months before Pearl Harbor, Robert O. Peterson (1916-1994) opened Topsy’s Drive-In at 6271 El Cajon Blvd. Five years after the war ended, he reopened it as the first Jack in the Box. He had recently left the Navy and his job as an intelligence officer entrusted with classified material.

An intelligence officer. Just the guy to supply us with “secret sauce.”

Lasting echoes

Almost everywhere you go in San Diego, there’s an echo from the war.

Go into Tom Rice’s house in Coronado and the former paratrooper might tell you how jumping into France on D-Day tested a person’s mettle. “If you didn’t have it then, you were never going to get it.” He might draw you a diagram from memory of the day he was shot in the knee by a German sniper in Bastogne.

Visit Harris Chuck in Vista and you might hear about how the Japanese followed up the bombing of Pearl Harbor with an invasion of Guam, where he was stationed. He spent the war at a forced labor-camp in Hirohata, Japan, stealing rice to prevent starvation, surviving a beating when he got caught. He knew the war was over when the prisoners woke up one day and the guards were gone.

In Del Cerro, Ken Miles can tell you about survivor’s guilt. He was in the Marines, headed to Iwo Jima and the awfulness there, when he was ordered home. His two brothers, both in the Army, had been killed in the Philippines, and the military had a rule — think “Saving Private Ryan” — against the war claiming all of a family’s sons.

More than 400,000 Americans lost their lives in the war. They left behind some 183,000 sons and daughters. Those children grew up with a ghost in their lives. They either learned to ignore it or make peace with its presence.

Sharon Crowley was not yet 1 when her father, William, died in a midair collision of B-24s in July 1944 near Yap Island, in the Pacific. She spent much of her adult life wondering how it was possible to miss someone she never knew.

Roger Connor was 7 when his father, George, was killed in Belgium in January 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge. Connor had no photos of the two of them together, only vague recollections of his dad in uniform, telling him to “be good.”

Crowley and Connor didn’t know each other when they both wound up on the website for the American World War II Orphans Network, a nonprofit organization founded in the early 1990s. She was living in San Diego, he was in Washington, D.C. and they were both trying to find their fathers.

They found each other. Connor moved to San Diego, and they made their own peace with the war, their own ending. And their own beginning. The two orphans married.

U-T San Diego reporters Peter Rowe and John Wilkens explore how WWII shaped the “Greatest Generation” and our home. These stories will focus on local men and women who helped preserve our nation and re-create our city. The series is supported by U-T’s video partner, the Media Arts Center San Diego.